The Knock On Woody

May 18, 2000|By STEPHEN HUNTER The Washington Post

A memory: Woody Allen on a press junket in 1994. He's pale, a little soft unrisen biscuit of a man, so tiny and frail and frightened he appears infantile even among the not-very-grown-up reporters. His voice is timid, muffled with phlegm (a cold). His grip is pasty and cold. His eyes remain unfocused. He looks as if he'd rather face unanesthetized circumcision than the upcoming innocuous half-hour ordeal of puffball questions and fawning mass adoration.

A more recent memory, from earlier this month: Woody Allen, in his editing suite on Park Avenue. Can this be the same guy? Where do I get vitamins like these? Far from the squirt of flaccid dough he was then, the Woody of now is, if not quite a hardy buccaneer, at least vigorous. Hey, how about some tennis? Basketball, on a rented court in some church basement, followed off by jazz licks at Elaine's? Wanna arm-wrestle? Whatever his Rx, it's paying off.

Perhaps it's that the new movie, Small Time Crooks (it opens Friday), is an old-fashioned Woody-style comedy. Perhaps it helps furthermore that instead of your usual junket circus of baying hounds and hustlers and shoe-licking sycophants, this is a more refined experience: There are no others around, he's on home ground. Whatever, and who could know? The fact is, this Woody, in an open-necked white shirt and brown corduroy trousers, seems just pretty damn solidly in control.

That means he is not who you want him to be. "I am not him," he says.

"Him" would be, you know, the guy.

The guy who more or less changed American comedy in the late '50s and early '60s. Until then, comics were patter merchants, smooth, clever, with internal hard drives full up to the megabyte level with shtick. They knew a minimum of 7 million jokes, had them cross-indexed by subject, theme and topicality, and could recall them in a nanosecond. So the rabbi says to the priest now take my wife we-elll. They were great comics, of course -- Hope, Benny, Youngman, Burns pre-eminent among them. But they all came out of vaudeville to become Showbiz Inc. They were funny and fabulous and so artificial they could have been made from refined rhinestone.

Then came him: corduroy suit, button-down shirts, dirty bucks, eyes blown up and made alien-intelligent by black frame glasses, a sense of irony, a sense that the city was the center of the culture, a contempt for the slickness of showbiz, a sense of his own tragic failings, a fear of the physical. He knew the difference between Kierkegaard and Kant -- hell, he even knew how to spell Kierkegaard. He was anti-showbiz, with a twisted view of the world's true absurdity and his small place in it, his soul inevitably pessimistic, bomb-haunted, sex-obsessed, his persona unarmed with patter or soft-shoe.

"That was never me," this Woody says of that Woody. This Woody points out that as a director, he's got a good deal of financial and artistic responsibility and a good deal of discipline. "To get that stuff on the screen, you've got to work hard. You've got to raise money and you've got to know what to do with it." He recalls that when he was a boy, far from being the last picked in playground ballgames, he was the first. It's as if that other Woody, the one so many of us loved so long ago, no longer exists, and if it does at all, it is only as a construct. This man seems angst-free and inner-life-free, very smart and, sadly, not particularly funny. What is past is past: It exists only in memory, as something pulled off the hard drive for inquiring minds.

"I was never the guy reading Heidegger and taking notes in the margin. I was always more like a small-time crook than a professor."

He just played a professor on television.

"I was aware that I belonged to a new school of comedy," he says. "They called it `sick.' What is sick? They never knew what they meant. There weren't even any symptoms.

"I suppose it's tempting to think of us as alienated intellectuals, but in truth all of us -- myself, Nichols and May, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart -- had big followings. We played big rooms. We were in show business. We played Vegas, the Copacabana, places like that."

It is pointed out that in a certain way, he alone is the survivor -- at least he's the one who is still making people laugh.

"Mike Nichols has had a great career as a director. Elaine chose not to be as productive. Mort was uncompromising. He would take five years off to investigate the Kennedy assassination with Jim Garrison. I never took any chances. I was a disciplined worker who made the most of a less powerful talent. I considered my talent less profound than most of the others', and I was very lucky and took advantage of my opportunities."